The last ten years have been like a genocide, but for IP's. What I don't get is why they keep handing the reins to people intent on poisoning one multimillion dollar franchise after another. Seriously asking, how does this keep happening? Has the rot set in too deeply?
To spare you the details of a typical longpost, I'll cut it to the point. There's three reasons:
First, Marketing is overrun with these assclowns, and you have to understand how and why they got there. If you're familiar with how clickbait rose to prominence (and subsequently fell), it's the same shit. Publications worked out easy ways to dick-ride the Facebook recommended algorithm and used that to promote themselves over their rivals, something that persisted until Zuckerberg specifically nuked clickbait off the platform. It was never popular; they developed what was basically an algorithmic Gameshark. Most Facebook users were female and left-wing, so appeal to those demographics with rage-bait, something the Progressives were already doing. This inevitably led to this content getting frontpaged and everyone who could do the same thing doing so. When the clickbait model got shot in the head, they never adapted. The people who pushed clickbait as the wave of the future and Social Media audiences as the
other wave of the future are still doing it, even now, as company after company chases something that failed half a decade ago.
Second, while people are quite correct that the single most dangerous aspect of Progtards is their propensity for incompetent cronyism (because they see someone who's incompetent but one of the flock as inherently more moral than someone who's peerless at their job and a filthy wrongthinker- See also: Why Druckmann agitated for Amy Hennig's removal), you don't actually
need that many at a company to fuck
everything up: Just one or two idiots at the wrong position can make all the difference in the world. If you take a look at Star Wars, for example, the decision by George to put Kathleen Kennedy in charge began a cancer that would inevitably result in the downfall of that franchise. It was Kennedy who pushed for the story group full of diversity hires with absolutely no experience, who pushed for Abrams and later Rian Johnson, who pushed for Progressive themes, who actively encouraged policitization of the films and antagonizing fans. All it takes is the wrong person getting high enough in the tree and into a position where the restraints are off, and they'll spare nothing at bringing about their "vision," often without regards for anything else.
Third, companies are fucking huge, and very often, have departments that are completely seperate from one another. It's not uncommon for departments to cook the books against one another and pretend everything is fine to the point of lying to the investors, when it suits them. Very often, the people in the chain of command who very well could do something about it either have absolutely no idea what's going on, some idea, but are willing to overlook some of it as long as it meets its quarterlies, or are actively on the take and don't give a fuck as long as it pushes ideology. Regardless of the three, the situation is often such that there's no way to mitigte it by the time it rolls about - they have to either release the resulting clusterfuck or waste time and money effectively redoing the project. Even when action is taken, that action can get mitigated if, again, the wrong people are in the proper departments.
The good news is that this shit is dying. It's economic poison, nobody wants this shit, and it sells like testicular cancer. The bad news is that it's going down kicking and screaming and it's going to continue to fuck things up in its death throes.
thinking it's gonna bomb. At worst I think it will underperform but still make a small profit. Journos are going to suck this games dick(female) until the cows come home. They'll try to make it seem like the people bashing the game are contrarians to the layman. And that's all before the payola Sony will no doubt offer, you'll get reviews like the Easy Allies one for The Last Guardian which was basically "Framerate is shit, tutorials never stop popping up, controls are ass, and the AI is annoying. 10/10".
